One - Paraparaumu

Off went the boys into the big, blue sea.
- Puberty Blues

I was a teenager in Paraparaumu. I didn’t like it much. There is a chance I wouldn’t have liked anywhere much, but this is something you can never know. There is more to do and buy in Paraparaumu now than there was in the 1980s, but I still think it might be shitty to be a teenager in Paraparaumu. It doesn’t feel like a small town it feels like a suburb, a suburb without a city. Suburbs were invented to comfort the middle-aged, and give the youth something to kick against.

I went to school at Kapiti College which was next to the Raumati Beach shops, and about a ten minute bike ride from my house. The students of Kapiti College wore the same uniform as everyone else in New Zealand (grey, shapeless) with a maroon jersey. Going to school was the main thing that I did. I was ok at school, quite good at English, but diffident towards it. I played soccer, and Dungeons and Dragons. I didn’t read a single book for pleasure during all of my years at Kapiti College, but I did have a weekly subscription to Smash Hits.

Music was heady stuff for me in Paraparaumu. It was the planned route of escape from the ordinariness of small towns and suburbia. I carefully took the posters out of Smash Hits and blu-tacked them across the walls of my bedroom. It wasn’t a serious magazine, but the 80s were a rich period for glossy singles, and hairdos and blocks of bright colour, so it was the right magazine for the time. I began to accumulate cassettes and LPs. After awhile I bought a second hand electric guitar off a friend. My mother took me to the local guitar shop and bought a small amplifier and some lessons. I had found my obsession.

It is virtually impossible to get a teenage boy to do something he doesn’t want to do, but a teenage boy in the grip of an obsession is a fanatic. The obsessed teenage boy will go through the rituals of their dreams over and over again. They will spend weeks that turn into months kicking that ball, or swimming the sea, or pulling apart that engine, or making his hand into the awkward, painful, contorted shapes necessary to make an E chord. The skin on your finger tips will hurt, the back of your hand will ache, but it is worth it to hear that buzzing, rattling, out of control first chord come out of the strum of your free hand. Magical.

And because magazines like Smash Hits don’t record failure it will seem possible to you in your bedroom in Paraparaumu that you too will be able to strum and sing your way from nowhere into the glare of worldwide fame and riches. If it were possible for bands like Crowded House and INXS then it was possible for you. You may look at the photo of our hero and laugh at the naivety of the dream, but naivety is always a part of dreams; they go together like inhale and exhale.